NEGOWAT Informe resumido

Methodology to support periurban water drinking commitees

In Bolivia as in other countries of Latin America much work has been done to help design and implement community management for rural water supply, but there is a marked absence of such methodologies for supporting peri-urban committees. These are very different from rural (and urban) systems in term of the complexity of systems, the size of the budget managed, and the challenges faced. Such systems are also very common in Andean countries, for exemple in Cochabama where they probably supply more people with water than the utility.

The Negowat team worked to develop and test a methodology to strengthen the management of community-driven drinking water committees in peri-urban areas. The methodology aims to improve the capacity of the management team and grassroots users. The approach allows to create a space for discussion and a participatory approach is implemented to find locally-specific solutions to the problems faced by the committees, using simulation tools such as role playing game and scenario analysis.

These tools are used for awareness raising and training to help communicate the issues and encourage participants to find better solutions than had been tried in the past.

A generic role-playing game called SosteniCAP (for Sustainability of Drinking Water Committees), that can be adapted to help raise awareness and discuss the problems faced by different committees has been developped.

Thus, the methodology proposed includes the mobilization and awareness raising of grassroot users (with a specific attention to women and young people) as well as capacity building of the management team and representatives. The application areas are the 500 committees that are supplying water for 500000 inhabitants in the metropolitan areas of Cochabamba and other commuties based water committee in periurban areas of Andeans countries.

The methodology and related tools have been tested and validated in a couple of different situations. They have proved sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the different types of issues that can be found in such large application domain (main management problems for water committees). They are directly and immediably usable by NGO or local developers, provided specific training.

Dissemination included the elaboration of a book comparing diferent methodology to support community-based water drinking commitee in rural areas, urban and periurban aereas, a serie of booklets for managers of community water drinking committees and presentation to local leaders in the areas.

The work has contributed to raise awareness at national level about the importance of self-organized drinking water committee, an alternative that could be valuable in a conflictuous context driving the discussion about water supply and privatisation in Andean countries.

Centro AGUA of UMSS is part of a Bolivian network that aims at supporting the set up of Resource Centres on Water and Sanitation. This network gathers a large diversity of involved stakeholders: NGOs, University, private sector. Such initiative is supported by the IRC Dutch NGO. Knowledge obtained during the Negowat project, as well as the various publications (booklets for drinking water committees, book gathering experiences of supporting drinking water committee management in Bolivia and Colombia) will be used and disseminated through this network.